Only the Crazy and Fearless Win BIG! by Arthur Wylie

Author:Arthur Wylie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781935618850
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-20T14:45:00+00:00

A Leap of Faith

On October 28, 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli officially joined a select group in history. On that date, Roncalli, the son of sharecroppers from a small country village in the Italian province of Bergamo, was elected the 261st Pope of the Catholic Church and Sovereign of Vatican City.

Cardinal Roncalli’s election was a surprise to all, even him. In fact, he traveled to the conclave of cardinals—the meeting to vote for the new pope—with a return train ticket in his pocket. He certainly didn’t think he’d be staying on—for the rest of his life, as it turned out.

Because he was older—76 the day he got the job—most assumed he’d be a mere stopgap pope, filling the office for a few short years until the cardinals could get the man they really wanted to be pope—Giovanni Montini, Archbishop of Milan (who could not become a pope at the time because he had not yet been made a cardinal). And they were right: Roncalli served less than five years, dying in June 1963, and shortly thereafter, Montini was elected and became Pope Paul VI.

But during the five years of his reign, Roncalli—Pope John XXIII—turned the Roman Catholic Church inside out and upside down. The sharecroppers’ son may have been a simple, friendly man, but he was a big thinker as well.

He was fearless and crazy from the beginning, starting with the selection of his papal name. The name John hadn’t been chosen by a pope for more than 500 years, primarily because the last Pope John was considered an “antipope” after the Western Schism split the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, Roncalli chose John, “a name sweet to us because it is the name of our father, dear to me because it is the name of the humble parish church where I was baptized.”68

Within weeks of his coronation, Pope John XXIII was turning heads and making headlines. On Christmas Day 1958, he became the first pope since 1870 to make pastoral visits in his diocese of Rome. He visited two hospitals in the city, bringing comfort to the sick, including children with polio. The next day, he practiced another of Jesus’ beatitudes, visiting inmates at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison. “You could not come to me,” he told the prisoners. “So I came to you.”69

These good works created a sensation, and the world had begun to discover that this pope named John was something special.

And then he did something so special, so extraordinary, that his place in history was secured: just three months after his election, he called for an ecumenical council, a gathering of all the church’s bishops to meet and decide major issues of faith, tradition, and policy. Pope John XXIII explained why he called the council in simple terms: it was time to open the windows of the church and let in a little fresh air.

The last ecumenical council had been called a century earlier and was known as the First Council of the Vatican, or Vatican I. Among the decisions

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